RUTH SUNDERLAND: Time to halt the tax tangles after Barclays saga

Barclays boss Bob Diamond clearly thinks his bank was the victim of a political mugging when it was identified in its ‘highly abusive’ manoeuvre to avoid £500m of tax earlier this year.

He is probably right. No doubt Diamond was seen as an easy scalp for George Osborne, who described tax avoidance in his Budget as ‘morally repugnant’.

Other companies, including Goldman Sachs, appear to have been treated with a great deal more understanding by the authorities.

Food for thought: Barclays boss Bob Diamond clearly thinks his bank was the victim of a political mugging

But Diamond will not garner much sympathy from the public over the singling out of Barclays and the hurt to its reputation.

This is the man who courted shareholder anger over his own £5.75m tax equalisation payment. This is the bank that still operates 134 Cayman Island subsidiaries – after it has shut down more than a quarter of its companies in that tax haven.

Critics will also note that Barclays paid £300m of UK corporate taxes last year, a sum dwarfed by the £2.6bn it paid out in bonuses.

In truth, neither Barclays nor the authorities come out of this spat with much credit. One wonders what IMF supremo Christine Lagarde, who lectured Greece on its dysfunctional tax system at the weekend, would make of it all.

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Diamond should concentrate his energies on good corporate citizenship instead of writing letters of complaint.

And if the Government really wants to tackle tax avoidance by big companies, then it should turn its guns on the likes of Google as well as Barclays.

The technology firm paid just £5m in UK tax in 2010 on income of £2.1bn by locating its HQ in lower-tax Ireland, but the Government is still enjoying a love-in with the search engine giant. Why?

Manduca at the Pru

The reaction of some disgruntled shareholders to the appointment of Paul Manduca to chair the Prudential has been less than ecstatic.

They are annoyed that Manduca was leading the search process before he was asked to consider the job himself.

For sure, that is not ideal, but it is a shame it has overshadowed the appointment.

Leaving aside the unorthodox process, Manduca is a seasoned City veteran who more than fulfills the job requirements.

He has proved himself a skillful non-executive director with a reputation for being able to defuse tricky boardroom situations, as he did at supermarket group Wm Morrison, where he helped restore calm after the messy takeover of Safeway.

He also has plenty of experience in the insurance sector, having served as chairman of Aon. The idea that he would have somehow manipulated the process to steer himself into the top job is simply preposterous.

It may seem strange that the Pru could not find an outside candidate for a job paying £600,000 for four days of work a week.

But chairmanships of insurers used to be part-time, highly prestigious posts – now they are pretty much full-time jobs, and risky ones at that.

Potential candidates will have been acutely aware of the defenestration of Andrew Moss at Aviva, and indeed that of Manduca’s predecessor, Harvey McGrath.

The industry is struggling with the challenges of ‘Solvency II’ – new EU rules demanding that insurers hold much more capital to reduce the danger of them going under.

Regulators also want qualified and experienced people at the top, which winnows out many industrialists.

Manduca’s elevation leaves his senior non-executive role going spare. The Pru must fill this post with an outsider.

Offering it to an internal candidate – such as Sir Howard Davies, who resigned from the London School of Economics last year over links with Libya – would be a step too far for the governance mavens.

High spirits

Drinks giant Diageo has become far more exotic than in the days when it was best known for its pints of Guinness and tots of Johnnie Walker.

Its £300m deal yesterday to take over Brazil’s Ypioca – try saying that after a glass or two of the sugar-cane-based beverage – marks another step in its plan to expand sales in emerging markets to half the total, from around 40 per cent now.

The big prize is Jose Cuervo, the Mexican tequila maker; Diageo has been in talks with the family owners for some time.

In the meantime, it has been executing a number of smaller deals, including the £1.3bn purchase of Mey Icki, the largest spirit maker in Turkey.

The gloom in the eurozone may be enough to have the Greeks gulping down the Metaxa, but emerging markets have far more promise. Make mine a Caipirinha.